


Currency

by longnoideatime



Category: Saints Row
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-30
Updated: 2018-11-30
Packaged: 2019-09-02 16:19:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16790419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/longnoideatime/pseuds/longnoideatime
Summary: Beginning in SR I after the opening cutscene.





	Currency

Trust. People gave it away so easily, it was like gold back before the Europeans landed in the new world, when no one understood the value of it. Though gold had an imaginary value, trust's — That was a real, tangible thing. Stowe didn't trust anybody. What she'd seen of the world more than backed her up. Most people didn't even know her first name; head down, mouth shut, with a knife hidden beneath her clothes was how she'd survived since she left home at thirteen. She'd've carried a katana but those tended to draw too much attention. She'd grown up just another poor, screwed up, mixed race trash kid in Stillwater, a city littered with them and stories just like hers. There were probably stories worse than hers, but she didn't talk enough to ask.

Which made it all the more confusing to find that she'd actually gone to the church the Samuel Jackson hat guy and the New Yorker had asked her to, rescue or not. They wanted something from her, or "Julius" did, that had been stated, not shied away from, but for once she found herself more curious of what it was than wary of approaching. Warped and pink skin from the burning car was still patterned up one side of her face, and across the forearm she'd thrown up to shield herself from the heat, her hands tucked into her jeans as she watched Julius speak, the ends of her too large grey sweatshirt hanging over her arms. Her dyed blonde hair fell forward into her pale face, shielding one cautious black eye from view as she leaned against a skinny new tree. Her mother was Korean, and deaf after an incident in her early childhood you can fuck off about, her father a tall and skinny trailer park resident with a temper.

The New Yorker, Troy, noticed her first. He dressed like she pictured the Bronx, and there was a cigarette dangling from between his lips, but he seemed less like a dirtbag than gold chains usually made men out to be. She figured she should've pushed off from the tree, gone to join the crowd of purple listening, but it felt almost like a test to not. His eyes held hers, and she wondered if he knew already that quiet didn't mean shy, didn't mean she couldn't meet whatever small challenge was there.

She held his eyes until something Julius said drew them away, and then she slipped behind the tree, moving soundlessly away. She could've turned a corner and disappeared like she'd never made the lapse in judgment to appear in the first place, but instead she walked straight down the street. Three blocks and she couldn't've gone straight any longer, the road only branching in two directions. She counted them beneath her feet, meanwhile reminding herself that she looked indistinguishable from everyone else around her. Even if one of them did come after her, the odds of them being able to pick her out from anyone else on the street were minuscule. She stopped at the end, taking in a deep breath and releasing the momentary illusion, that she wanted something different. She turned and caught sight of the New Yorker running down the street. He didn't quite have sight of her but he was looking, a cigarette clenched so tightly between his teeth she suspected he'd torn the paper. She hesitated for the briefest of moments and he caught sight of her, slowing. He removed the ruined cigarette from his mouth, spitting out tobacco and filter and replacing it with a new one he stopped to light. Her brain caught up to what was happening and she took a half step away, towards the street home, but his eyes flicked up from his hands cupped around his cigarette and Stowe found herself floored again. 

He flicked his lighter closed as he reached her, studying her. He offered her the packet of smokes and she took one, fingers long and thin. It was an expensive habit, but she smoked when people offered.

He lit the cigarette between her lips and she inhaled, exhaled, her eyes steady on his.

"Why'd you show up?" he asked. 

"Why'd you follow me?" she returned, her voice as raspy and rough as if she couldn't remember the last time she'd spoken. And she couldn't. She looked away from him so she couldn't see if he'd noticed her eyes widen at his being the first to win any words from her in so many years. 

Stowe thought most things through carefully. Coming today had been an exception, an instinct, a pull out of her apartment, but she couldn't answer his question, couldn't put into words what had made her break from the quotidian of her deathly silent existence. Whether he could or couldn't answer her question, he didn't. "I'm Troy."

She looked at him silently, without reciprocating, the two of them moving slightly like seaweed caught in a gentle current as they unconsciously shifted to avoid the eddies of people swirling past them without breaking the fragile bubble that had formed around them. They both seemed to realise what they were doing at the same time.

"Do you drink?" he asked, puffing somewhat irritably on his smoke. 

It looked like just a habit on him, but on her the languorous underwater movements and careful exhalations, coupled with her pensive faraway eyes, made her look like something out of a print from the 1920's, or some other vague form of art. Troy hadn't really seen eyes that could be both thoughtful and faraway, sharp and wary at the same time. 

Her shoulders shifted and shrugged, bony even through the padding of her sweatshirt, but he heard her follow him when he started walking down the street. She was tall and thin in a sort of awkward way, where she didn't look like she fit into her limbs, shrunken in, and her clothes seemed like she'd picked them so people would look at her as little as possible, her curtain of platinum Malfoy blonde hair somehow still falling forward to shroud half her face even when he looked over his shoulder and saw her tuck it back behind one ear.

He chose the closest bar; she wasn't anxious or frenetic enough to be called skittish, but it felt like every moment alone with her was just building closer to her deciding she no longer wanted to play this game, and decisively disappearing into mist. They settled at the bar in ways emblematic of each of their habits: Troy shrugging off his jacket, pulling an ashtray closer as he hunched over the bar in a slouch no different from any other working class Northerner with an accent, waiting for the bartender's attention with wearily alert eyes; Stowe's shoulders curled in on themselves, her frail looking body disappearing into her clothes, made for a normal sized person and so baggy on her, her eyes almost daring any of the flea bitten other patrons of the dingy dark place to approach her as they swept the room. It was weird to be with another person who instinctively identified exit routes, but after Dex and Johnny, Troy was getting slowly used to it. Still, it seemed misplaced on a skinny kid like her, until you saw the flashes of hauntings in her eyes, like those little silvery fish in the shallow end of a lake. He raised two fingers and got the man's attention, busy with two others at the opposite end. This early in the day the place was nearly deserted, but it had the dusty grime of a place unused to people, crowds, even during peak hours. 

Troy looked at Stowe, looking at her own languidly fidgeting hands on the bar instead of meeting his eyes challengingly. There was something about her, probably the same thing Julius had felt, where she instinctively seemed important, like events would revolve around her if she only got too close to them. He'd never had a feeling like that about a person before. The bartender appeared, jerking his chin to ask what they wanted.

"Whiskey neat. Whatever's cheapest."

"Old Milwaukee."

She smirked at him as the man moved away and he raised an eyebrow. "What?"

She shook her head, but when he kept staring at her she sighed and rolled her eyes. "Your drink suits you."

The man came back, either irritated or saddled with a face that was always pissed off, sliding their drinks across the counter. The first seemed most likely. The girl caught hers despite the force, her reflexes quicker than he would've expected.

"Are you even old enough to drink?" he asked, snorting as he took a pull from the brown bottle, condensation already forming on the glass. 

"None of your business," she said flatly, taking a quick drink, knocking the glass back and quickly down. 

He lit up another cigarette and she pulled one from his pack before he offered, her eyes like she was expecting a fight. He lit it without comment, his hands close enough to hers he had that ghostlike sensation of touching her without ever actually closing the gap. "Why'd you show up?" he asked again, watching her. 

Stowe pursed her lips, holding his cigarette between her fingers, her thumbnail digging into her forehead as she absently scratched over her eyebrow, thinking, picking her words carefully. "I don't know. I didn't think about it. Why did you follow me?" Her eyes flicked to his and met them suddenly when she'd been avoiding them. It was a shock to her system how intently he was looking at her, when no one had been paying attention for years. She relied on how unobservant, how self-centric people were as a tenet of the universe, like the laws of physics, gravity. 

"The same," he said eventually, breaking eye contact with her to tap his smoke into the ashtray. He pushed it so it was more centred between them. "Are you going to come back?"

She looked him over carefully. "You're not going to push to recruit me?"

He shrugged and drank his beer. "Do what you want."

She smiled, taking the same hurried gulp of a drink, her hands toying with the glass when she set it back against the counter. He got what she was smiling for, the idea that he could tell her what to do; she did what she wanted already. It was a strange kind of smile, not at all indicating happiness, crooked and small and hidden and sharp. It looked like something an implike fairy wth grey skin and pointed teeth would have right before she lunged and tore a chunk of flesh away, devoured you. Except the melancholy, which made him think she was retired.

"D'you always know what you want?" she asked suddenly, looking at him slantwise, her knee bumping his when she turned her body to face him. 

He scoffed, bleak and wry and self deprecating. "No." He shook his head as he brought the bottle to his lips. 

She looked at the clock on the wall, stubbing out her cigarette and finishing her whiskey. "I've gotta go." He put his beer down, watching her movements. She stood in the small space between their stools. "Are you coming?"

"To yours?"

She nodded once, watching him carefully. He felt tested, but stood, grabbing his jacket and following her silently as she walked. She moved down the streets like she was one of them already, constantly alert, scanning for dangers and watching for people who could've been following them. Her building was small and shittier even than where he was staying, the neighbourhood more than rough, her keys austere when she unlocked the door. The room was almost entirely empty, a shower stall next to the refrigerator, a folding table and lone chair before the stove. Dishes were drying in the rack next to the sink, and a couch was pulled out facing crates and boxes of overflowing paperbacks, the sheets neatly made up. It was small, but the furniture was so scant he could see the space she'd cleared by a sword resting in its sheath. It didn't quite look like a katana, maybe because in reality they were a pretty impractical weapon, even ignoring guns, but was clearly Asiatic. He made a note of it to look into later; he got the feeling if he'd have searched the place he would've found more knives, maybe a gun. She unzipped her jacket for the first time, even thinner than he'd thought, not like Friends in the 90s, worse, bony like a sickly kid. 

Stowe didn't let people into her apartments often. They didn't say anything about her personally, except that there wasn't anything to be said, her life transient and purposefully empty, but it was still a vulnerability unless you moved the next day. Still, she occasionally felt the need for something not battery operated. If she'd felt human she would've said she was only human, but all of her humanity had been carefully excised, and anything stubborn left behind — like a tumour — was suppressed.

Troy found himself backing up when she approached him, her expression unchanging, unoffended or effected. His back hit the wall and she was there a step later, her hands cautious and gentle when they laid on his shoulders, her eyes too large in her face as they flicked fathomlessly between his, the girl on her tiptoes and still not quite equal to his height, the length of her body pressed almost entirely against his. She leaned forward and pressed her lips to his. He caught her wrist, his hand too tight around the fragile bones, his other hand on her prominent hipbone as he found himself responding, drawing her closer. She fell easily back before him, evidently being in charge not necessary to her, despite the beginning, her mouth working just as hungrily against his, his knee between her legs as they moved unevenly towards the bed. He dug his fingers into her hair, her hands undoing his belt. He hadn't expected to want her, carefully ignoring the part of his brain screaming about being undercover, her being a potential CI. She fell back onto her bed when he pushed her, not losing a beat, pulling her shirt overhead, her tits exposed without a bra beneath. He followed overtop of her, undoing her jeans as he kissed her, shoving his hand inside, his weight resting on her as she pressed her hips up at him to allow for easier access. He drank in her reactions, unashamed of any perceived selfishness, her neck exposed as she dipped her head back, quiet gasps falling from her lips. He bit the flesh over her right tit, feeling her pulse around his fingers. He withdrew as she quietly breathed heavy breaths through her nose, pulling her jeans the rest of the way down her legs. Her hands idly brushed the waist of his jeans and he met her eyes again, dark pools of ink watching him. He pulled his shirt overhead and when he emerged she'd moved from beneath him. She jerked his legs so he sat on the edge of the bed with his knees spread, kneeling between them. He kissed her, his hands roaming over what he could reach of her while she fished his dick out of his boxers. She broke away from him and her head bobbed down, making him swear. She was better at blowing him than he would've expected, something about the suction of her mouth, too big for her face, but he jerked her up before he came, his hand around her upper arm, and she settled on his lap, her knees on either side of his waist. 

"I don't have—" he said, a little strained and breathing hard. 

"Pill," she said. He didn't know if his pride should've been wounded by how emotionless she sounded. She sank down onto him and his breath escaped in a grunt. She didn't feel close enough as she moved, rolling her hips into him, and he sucked her titflesh into his mouth easily, fleabites really all they were, but she pushed his head harder against her, until he bit down again and he felt her shudder, the tiniest bit. He gripped her waist and flipped her so she lay on her stomach in the middle of the bed, pushing back into her damp heat. She pushed her ass against him and he gripped her hair, tugging while he fucked into her harshly. She had a dragon tattooed across her upper back, the lines and colours stark and clean against her pale skin. He didn't last past her next climax, rolling off her while he tried and failed to catch his breath. She lay on the bed, propped up on her elbows just enough that her chest was hidden by the rumpled sheets and blankets, her hand over her mouth as she eyed him. 

He met her gaze, his arm spread wide across the bed, the other resting on his stomach. "What?"

"Cigarette?" she asked, lifting her head off her hand.

He nodded and she leaned off the side of the bed, pulling a kind of holographic, shiny gold pack of cigarettes with Asian lettering across the front from underneath the mattress. Her lighter was gold too, novelty, with a Chinese dragon engraved on the front. He guessed she had a thing for them. It looked old, but cheap, probably something of sentimental value, and she tossed it to him after lighting her own rather than getting close as he'd done with her. She stood off the bed, stepping out of the underwear ruined with their combined fluids that they'd only pushed aside while having sex. He watched her wipe between her legs with a paper towel, her cigarette held up high as she bent to examine her legs, checking that she hadn't missed anything. Her clothes were on a rack he could tell she'd installed, and neatly folded in a suitcase beneath.

"You have work?"

She made a noise in the affirmative, holding the cigarette between her lips as she pulled on clothes as nondescript as those he'd met her in, though they were less baggy. He watched her pull up the leg of her jeans to tuck a knife into place, her white hightops drawn on with unexpectedly artistic flowers in blue pen. She pulled a sweater on over her tanktop, covering the parts of the dragon tattoo across her upper back still visible. It was too clean, too colourful to have been done more than a couple years ago, which supported his theory about her age. He stood up and pushed her into the wall, his movements unhurried and deliberate, pressing against her ass so she felt him hard against her, his hand slipping past the waist of her jeans, down into the juncture between her thighs. She pushed back against him, letting his fingers curl into her once again. Her hands shook, braced against the wall. He liked listening to their breaths in the empty room.

**Author's Note:**

> Kind of short, I know, and not a lot happens. I wrote this a long time ago. I’d like to write more, but I’m weirdly afraid to fuck up what’s there. 😂 So maybe comment and tell me it’s shit already.


End file.
